What is Mary?

Mary is CrossFit Girl benchmark workout WOD. Mary is usually programmed on the CrossFit.com as a harder alternative to another CrossFit Girl Cindy.

WOD Mary is 20-minute AMRAP that consist of relatively short rounds of challenging gymnastic movements. You will need to do 5 HSPU, 10 pistol squats, and 15 pull-ups in each round.

What is a good score for Mary?

According to our app WOD Time Calculator, a good time to beat for the best athletes is 20 or more rounds, for advanced athletes ~14 rounds, for average athletes almost 10 rounds and for beginners about 7 rounds.

How to get a good score in WOD Mary?

Mary is relatively long WOD with short rounds and a lot of transitions. This means that you should move quickly between movements and have a consistent pace.

You should also build your strategy about your the weakest movements as you want to go fast on movements that you are good too and split correctly the movement that you are bad at.

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HSPU

Five HSPU is not much, and most of you would be able to do them unbroken. If you struggle with HSPU, do them in 2 sets of 3+2 or 3 sets of 2+2+1.

No matter how good you are with HSPU, you should always focus on these things:

1) Strong kip, knees to chest then make kip quick
2) Get to the wall immediately after pull-ups, no need to rest before and after HSPU
3) Switch to smaller sets mid-workout if you are not sure about hitting five in a row

Pistols

I am sorry to say that but you got pistols, or you don’t. Some of you will blaze through pistols while rest of you will get stuck there.

Always try to start pistols as soon as you get from the wall. You can do five right when you finish last HSPU then move to a pull-up bar and finish five under a pull-up bar.

Here are a few tips for better pistols:

1) Think about the center of mass, a leg goes one way, the body goes to the opposite direction
2) Use lifting shoes or step on a small plate with a heel
3) Chest goes forward, glutes go back, you can even try holding your tip toes

Pull-ups

As you have already noticed, I told you to not rest before and after HSPU and pistols, but you have to rest or at least slow down somewhere in a 20 min AMRAP.

Pull-ups are a great place to rest. You will probably need to chalk up and split reps into at least two or three sets.

Your goal should be to have about the same speed on pull-ups no matter what round you are in. This means you will start slowly, but you won’t slow down in the second half of the WOD.

Don’t do pull-ups unbroken even if you are great at them. Do at least two sets of 8+7 or three sets of 6+5+4 from the first round. Some of you may aim for +15 rounds which means that you will need to do over 225 pull-ups and it is almost impossible to do 15 sets of 15 reps unbroken even if you are very efficient at pull-ups.

If your max unbroken pull-ups set is only about 15-20 pull-ups, try to do 5 sets of 3 pull-ups. It may feel like too many sets, but you will be able to keep that pace for full 20 minutes, you will be able to recover a little on pull-ups and increase the pace on other two movements.